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Je n'aime pas dans les vieux films américains quand les conducteurs ne regardent pas la route. Et de ratage en ratage, on s'habitue à ne jamais dépasser le stade du brouillon. La vie n'est que l'interminable répétition d'une représentation qui n'aura jamais lieu.

The Scam (2006) - James Byron Huggins

On its face, this book would seem like a departure for Huggins.  It’s about a huge financial scam being run by a mysterious conglomerate with shadowy figures at its heart; a group of unlikely heroes are set on the task of running the financial scam to ground and exposing the villains behind it.  This sounds like a very different kind of thriller than Huggins’ usual turf, but fear not!  The villains have hired an icepick wielding killer code-named Iceman to track down and murder those on their trail.  Throw in a chess prodigy who also happens to be a crack shot with any weapon you throw at him and a badass female Israeli soldier and this book provides more bullet spraying than number crunching.  It’s a good hundred pages too long, though, and it’s not nearly on the level of The Reckoning, the book in Huggins’ bibliography that it most resembles.  It’s a fairly solid genre thriller, not much more.  2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – nominally about a financial scam, this book actually delivers a ton of action and gunplay, but the characters are lacking and it’s far too long for what it is: a potboiler.  2 ½ stars. 

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